yclmanager5, Author at Your Computer Lady

January 10, 2019 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

Habit Tracking Apps

Week 2 of the New Year’s Resolutions. Are you starting to lose steam? There’s an app for that!! Actually, there’s a multitude of apps for that. Tracking habits or changing habits is a great use of technology. The apps have reminders. They have rewards. They involve your support group. A couple even charge you real dollars for failure! So take a look at these suggestions and pick an app that fits your needs.

from Inc Magazine 6 Must-Have Habit-Boosting Apps

from Lifehack 24 Best Habit Tracking Apps

from BuzzFeed These Apps Will Actually Change Your Life

January 9, 2019 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

Password Protection

Confession is good for the soul, they say. So here goes…

Last week I tried to log onto my 2 laptops and kept getting the “Invalid password” message. I type that password twice every morning. Pre-coffee! Of course, I knew what it was. I tried rebooting. I tried CAPS ON and caps off. Finally I called my IT support who was going to come with his reset software.

I finally quieted down enough to try the password on auto-pilot as I usually do. Oh… yeah… there are 2 more digits to it.

Later in the week, my sister wiped her iPhone because she got confused about her phone password. She never turns off the phone therefore she never uses that password.

I use a password protector software but I had left my Windows password out of it. My sister uses a password storage software but it doesn’t have online access, only phone access.

Confession over. Let’s talk about how you can prevent either of these scenarios happening to you.

You ABSOLUTELY can not use the same password for multiple accounts! This is a serious problem. Please! It’s worth the effort to make your data safer. A data breach at Dropbox was just to gather passwords, not for info in files. The hackers take the passwords, try them at banks, PayPal, Google, etc. to get access to your personal data.

Option 1 – I strongly recommend this!

Use LastPass.com to record and input passwords. LastPass will fill in the user name and password for you on website logins. You can see the list from your computer, your tablet, your phone. You can access it online. You can store other info like social security numbers, spouse’s auto license plate number. I will help you set it up if you need some assistance. Basic service is free. Premium is only $24 a year. Using LastPass on your tablet or phone does make it easier to access sites from those small screens. And if the phone is locked up, you can access the password list from your computer.

Option 2

Create a series you can remember but changes with each account. Should be at least 8 characters including a capital letter and a special character.

Example: Series is 125cHaracters34$% (3rd character is always capitalized)

Then for your Google account the password is 12goOgl34$%

for Southwest Airlines the password is 12soUth34$%

for Yelp the password is 12yeLp34$%

You can remember the series. Each password is different so that if a hacker gets the Google password they can’t access Yelp.

This is IMPORTANT! Call me if you have questions or need help getting set up.

Post update on 05/03/18.

January 7, 2019 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

Measure Email Success Quarterly

Here’s some sound advice from Constant Contact about measuring your email marketing campaigns – Make quarterly plans and measure quarterly.

Measure success at the end of each quarter
If you spend all of your time tweaking your email marketing strategy, you’ll never be able to establish any consistency that will lead to success. Instead, let your plan run its course, and wait until the end of each quarter to monitor what’s working and what needs changing. Then, look to see if you’ve been trending upwards, downwards, or if you find yourself on a plateau.

Look for the campaigns driving success and ditch those that aren’t performing. If you’ve fallen into a plateau and can’t see a direction up or down, it may be time to try a bolder approach that will help create a more definable test. Choose a hypothesis you can stick to over the next three months, like adding more humor to every subject line, and see if it changes your metrics, such as boosting open rates.

YCL sends traffic reports after each email with comments about the strengths and weaknesses of the email. We never want to make decisions or change our marketing plan after one email, however. We want to look for trends. Are the Open Rates going up? Are the Click Rates going up? Is the number of Unsubscribes realistic?

If you would like to do a review of your email trends, call Pamela today. We can look at quarterly, semi-annual or even annual trends.

Good marketing is measurable!

December 31, 2018 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

Time for a new website?

“All things considered, the growth of websites has been quite remarkable thanks in large part to a decision on April 30th, 1993 by CERN. This decision made the world wide web available on a basis that was free of royalties.
In essence, it became a public domain which allowed people around the world to create their own websites.
It is interesting to note that the growth of the internet started in the 1970s and continued on a limited basis until the early 1990s. However, the world wide web itself is credited to Tim Berners-Lee, who began it in March, 1989 and introduced the first server, browser, and editor along with HTTP and HTML.”

Information found on https://www.millforbusiness.com/how-many-websites-are-there/

Is it time to start a website for your business? Let Your Computer Lady help! Click here to learn more about our one year website package.

December 19, 2018 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

How to Optimize Your Facebook Post

Get the biggest bang for your buck by writing a great post.

Example: Thank you @Jean Flis for your great presentation today at @WSRG. I love your “core, pop, fizz” mantra. I can do that! @Heartlink

Go to the person’s business page to make your post. That’s where they really need your support.
@Jean Flis will put the post on Jean’s personal FB profile. Only do this if you think she would want the post on her personal page. If in doubt, skip the personal page.
@WSRG will put the post on the WSRG networking group page. That’s where Jean made the presentation so you want the thank you to show up there.
@Heartlink will put the post on another group page that you know Jean belongs to.
Adding the comment about “core, pop, fizz” gives other people who see the post something to respond to, to “engage” with since FB wants engagement.

The @ sign tags the page. When you start typing the WSR, FB will give you a list of WSR… pages to select from.

Yes, you could add a photo of Jean doing her presentation to add more power to the post.

THANK YOU Jean Flis with Premier Design Jewelry for being my example. Jean is the go to gal for anything related to jewelry.

December 17, 2018 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

Dan Gilbert’s 19 Rules for Business

Dan Gilbert is the owner of 100 companies. These are his personal “rules” of business and the way he encourages his companies to operate. Pretty sound advice! Click here to read more!

December 14, 2018 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

New version of WordPress

On Dec. 6th, WordPress released a new version with a new editor. We were aware of the coming change. One of my programmers has been participating in the beta test team.

The new release is supposed to make the web experience better for your visitors and speed up load times. So far we are not impressed!! The upgrade has caused more problems than anticipated. Previous upgrades may have conflicted with a plug-in for a little glitch. This update has caused major issues on a couple of sites. On one of my sites, every blog was pointing to the same blog post! On another site, the payment processing glitched. I encourage each of you to carefully look at your pages and test all of your forms. (It’s good to review your site 2-3 times a year any way!)

In addition, WordPress published a new editor. Again, we are not impressed! The new editor does not seem to be as versatile as the previous one. It is definitely not “What you see is what you get” which makes pages and blogs easier to create. Fortunately, we are able to return/switch to the previous editor.

Please email if you have questions.

December 12, 2018 By yclmanager5 Leave a Comment

Contest Marketing

Could a contest bring you new clients or new sales? It depends. Read this article to see some examples of successful contests. Consider your business, your goals, your budget. Then let’s talk about a contest for you! Click here to read more about Contests.

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